62

This article focuses on the decision making process by which Japanese food companies are implanting in China. It postulates that the decision making process is influenced by constraints and resources that are issued from multiple territorial scales, from global to local: at the global and regional levels, Japanese enterprises have to come to term with the restructuring of the food industry and the new international division of labor; at the national level, the question is mainly linked to the market situation in Japan and to the food security in both Japan and China, while at the local level, Japanese subsidiaries have to deal with the local economic organization as well as with institutional matters. These sets of constraints and resources lead to different decisions, depending on the nature of the targeted market for the companies, as well as on the nature of the products made by the enterprise. These decisions will be introduced in the last section of the paper, through 12 cases studies and in-depth interviews recorded in Japan, Hong Kong and China.